It’s time to build. That was the core message Mark Carney drove home in the video introducing himself as a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, and it’s one he returned to over his brief tenure as Canada’s 24th prime minister. Now, as the surprise front-runner in an election that his Liberals seemed destined to lose, Carney is the most visible champion of a broader movement sweeping through progressive circles across the west: abundance liberalism.
“It’s high time we built things we’ve never imagined, at a speed we’ve never seen,” Carney said after a meeting with provincial and territorial premiers in the days leading up to the election call. That apparently includes “national trade and energy corridors” as well as high-speed rail and other nation-building projects. Indeed, the announcement heralding Carney’s new cabinet suggested his government would “make Canada an energy superpower in both conventional and clean energy.”
You could almost hear Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s teeth grinding as he read that. His dentist probably wasn’t any happier about Carney’s promise to eliminate regulations and barriers to the free flow of domestic commerce, a longstanding priority of Canadian business groups. “We intend, from a federal level, to have free trade by Canada Day,” Carney told reporters after his meeting with the premiers. “Our vision is one where goods, services and workers can move seamlessly from coast to coast to coast.”
In this, Carney has both distanced himself from the previous Liberal regime and captured the broader progressive zeitgeist. In the United States right now, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book “Abundance” has been the subject of widespread debate and discussion, with some — including, of course, its authors — suggesting that it can serve as a blueprint for a progressive revival. “It is about the freedom to build in an age of blocking; the freedom to move and live where you want in an age of a stuck working class; the freedom from curable diseases that come from scientific breakthroughs,” Thompson wrote in a March piece for The Atlantic. “Trump has defined his second term by demolition and deprivation. America can instead choose abundance.”
In their book and various online comments, Klein and Thompson both note that so-called “blue” states like California and New York are serving as negative advertising for all progressive politicians in America. They are places where housing is scarce and expensive, in large part because progressive governments have made it far too difficult to build and grow. They are places where lofty promises are often met with dismal results. And the same is true more broadly in Canada, where the Liberal government of the last nine-plus years did far too little to stimulate and support the kind of building that would meaningfully reduce housing prices or increase access to things like high-speed rail.
The most popular criticism of this thesis is that it’s rooted in the same kind of technologically-driven optimism that informs the worldview of most Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. It ignores the possibility that an embrace of abundance will simply lead to more consumption, carbon emissions and capitalist excess. If Jagmeet Singh’s NDP is looking for a way to get off the political mat, they might be tempted to take these arguments up here in Canada.
Either way, Carney isn’t new to the idea — or importance — of abundance. As I wrote back in 2023, he gave a speech at the Global Progress Action Summit laying out his belief in the importance of building. "That’s our calling: to build. Progressives build things that last — health care, infrastructure, schools, opportunity, sustainability and prosperity.”
He also warned, rather prophetically, about politicians who want to talk about why things are broken. "The bad news is that while these tactics never work economically, they can work politically,” he said. "Brexit happened. Donald Trump was elected. So we can’t dismiss the impact of anger. But we must resist its power. Doing that starts with progressives taking control of the economic agenda and making it everyone’s."
If his unexpected polling lead actually holds through election day, Carney will have a chance to create a roadmap for what this looks like for other progressive political leaders. Canadians are prepared, at least for the time being, to support efforts that disentangle us from our American ties on military spending and trade. They are willing to trade comfort for resilience if it means sticking it to the Trump administration. And they’re open to possibilities, whether that’s new pipelines or new policies, that weren’t an option before.
It’s time to build, in other words. In Mark Carney, Canadians may have found the perfect person to do it.
Comments
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It honestly befuddles me how Ezra Klein has become a poster boy to many progressives. I've listened to several of his podcasts over the years and there's actually some fairly right-wing ideas that he's promoting, in my opinion. Not least those from tech oligarchs he sometimes seems to idolize.
Now we have "abundance". Or, as former adult-movie-actress-turned-disco-queen Andrea True might say: More, More, More!
Let me introduce a couple of other ideas.
Chesterton's Fence: yes, let us progressives do away with all the nasty regulations that are so stifling our economy. Surely a free-for-all is the prescription needed now. Why don't we start with removing all banking regulations? That'll turn out well. Then, because we're not destroying the biosphere nearly fast enough, let's do away with all environmental regulations. Pharmaceutical trials? Who needs 'em? Any sort of fettering of corporate wim and securities oversight? Rules meant to maintain public order? Begone!
The quaint idea that we ought to know why a regulation exists before we strike it down is referred to as Chesterton's Fence.
https://search.brave.com/search?q=chesterton%27s+Fence
cont...
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Second, in the endless, ineffectual chatter about the housing crisis, what politician had actually said that we should reduce the price of property? It's always framed as "build more will make it more affordable" but they never actually say "housing prices need to drop by 50% for it to be considered affordable".
And, while I consider Mr. Poilievre anathema to my idea of Canada, in a comparison to Mr. Carney, at this moment, I would say only that Poilievre is much worse than Carney. That's because I really don't know Mr. Carney's economic sacred cows. Nor do you, I'd suggest.
Now we want an abundance in energy. A superpower in "traditional" (Orwellian speak for fossils) as well as renewables. Lots and lots of energy. Not a word about the apparent dissonance with the climate crisis. Not a peep of consideration that we could happily get by with less energy, actually. No mention of geopolitical realities of shifting from petroleum wars to critical mineral and water wars.
It seems instinctive for our species that, when faced with tough conditions, we consciously shut-off our critical thinking circuits, and seek the easy way out. This is prime season for snake oil salesmen and conman rainmakers.
https://youtu.be/VAfDqvhAFhQ?si=nCD0nGueg8T9S_CA
Debbie Downers? Go away! Come back, some day.
https://youtu.be/MNN_Na_hJVk?si=fiQi1ebqymFKQZ-d
Hope you like show tunes! lol
Yep. And everything to/for "middle class working families," and damned be the old women, the poor, and the disabled who are older than 64.
Besides, who needs lower expenses and more profits than builders. Good grief. Why would anyone consider their hundreds and hundreds of millions-a-year profits to be unnecessary.
And who, ultimately, pays the biggest proportion of their disposable income, but the poorest.
That's frankly not what I'd call progressive.
Chesterton's Fence should apply equally to doing away with the old in favor of the new ... and, FI, the too-fast, too-sloppy embrace of AI. Which can't even parse simple grammar, or use the correct homonym.
I shudder to think of what might happen when so much crappy diagnosis is fed into medical AI. In the end, it's same-old, same-old digital paradigm: gargage in, garbage out. Except now, without accountability: no pound of flesh be taken from a machine.
Every week or less, I hear of someone immediately known to me or to a friend, who's had an incorrect diagnosis, and now faces a very short time till life's end. Not that all of the correct Dx's could have made for a longer life-span, but the time left could have been spent doing something other than useless (often painful or debilitating) medical treatments for something that was never what the poor patient was suffering from.
I'm not a luddite, by any means. But there needs to be safeguards, and backups (to more than the welfare of AI systems, themselves!)
As was highlighted in the recent CCPA newsletter, the final 'Unions Power Prosperity' report (https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/programs/union-l…) mentions the importance of linking infrastructure projects with CBAs (community benefit agreements) to ensure that infra. spending connects with other social benefits -- a good way to mitigate some of the concerns with the whole 'abundance' paradigm.
Yeah - "Abundance" - trickle down economics by any other name still sucks for the majority.
"Community benefit agreements" usually mean employment of locals, and not much if anything at all beyond that.
"the freedom to build in an age of blocking"
Otherwise known as watering down environmental regulations. Running roughshod over local concerns. Trampling indigenous rights. Bribing impoverished reserve councils as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy. Intimidating protestors. Spying on activists. Suing ENGOs. Turning "review processes" into "approval processes".
Not a progressive agenda.
Fawcett: "so-called 'blue' states like California and New York are … places where housing is scarce and expensive, in large part because progressive governments have made it far too difficult to build and grow"
Given California's recent wildfire history and huge losses of infrastructure, including entire neighbourhoods and towns, I can understand why California would try to limit construction in forest zones.
If climate change is the urgent issue Carney says it is, and fossil fuel consumption is within a decade of peaking, new pipelines may be a poor investment, especially if taxpayers pick up the bill. Major infrastructure like pipelines takes decades to recoup its capital costs.
We don't have decades to expand fossil fuel production.
The IPCC warns that the world must nearly halve GHG emissions by 2030 and eliminate them by 2050 to keep warming below the danger limit of 1.5 C.
IEA's Net-Zero by 2050 report says no new investment in fossil fuels after 2021 to limit global warming to 1.5 C.
No time for fossil-fuel expansion.
I'm so sick of all the people in power deciding they can go their merry way, pump, drill and cut or burn forests, without counting the wildfires as carbon production (or the loss of forestland as a carbon sink), without counting Scope 3 emissions (or in some cases, even Scope 2).
Yes! Building an 'abundance' of fossil fuel infrastructure is wrong on so many levels. We need to be selective about what we build, and consider things like the fact that construction workers are needed to build both homes and pipelines. Pipeline construction is one of the factors behind the shortage of skilled and experienced construction workers to build homes in Canada.
"the Liberal government of the last nine-plus years did far too little to stimulate and support the kind of building that would meaningfully reduce housing prices" This is newspeak for 'reduce housing standards and building code constraints so developers can make more money". In reality, developers and flippers have made out like bandits over the last decade as homes were 'financialized' and house prices soared. The only way to provide less costly homes is for the community [aka the government], acting in its long term self interest, to finance and build them as not-for-profit affordable rentals that cannot be financialized. If not this, then a more radical solution would be to pay folks in the lowest 60th percentile of income enough to afford a financialized house, collapsing the current too large wage differential with the top 10%. Don't hold your breath!
"Building" is kind of like "efficiency". Sure, sounds good . . . but under whose control, in whose interests? Build the right things for the right purposes for the benefit of most people, and "building" is great. Build the wrong things for the wrong purposes for the benefit of and given to the control of the wealthy few, and "building" might not be so awesome, much the way "efficiency" isn't doing anybody much good under the control of a certain mr. Musk.
And I notice that the "abundance liberalism" schtick seems to be advancing the same corporate deregulation mantra as . . . the MAGA types in the US currently dismantling food safety and protection from fraud. There are reasons for regulations--they stop fools and greedheads from killing us and stealing from us.
It's not like ultra-conservative Calgary did not ALSO get high housing prices, despite a 30% empty downtown that is frantically repurposing offices into condos.
Do Abundance Twosome tackle, in that book, the crying need for "abundance" of teachers and staffed hospital beds? That's been going on a long time. There's "Abundance" of higher education in Europe, for instance, in all the countries where it's free.
The problem with abundance of most things is that we want more of the public things than the poor CAN pay for, or the rich are WILLING to pay for..and, alas, they are always in charge of tax rates.
Turning the abundance problem in housing over to the private sector has given us no abundance there, even in places like BC that have removed all zoning problems for two years now - developers say they STILL can't make enough money, so not as many housing starts as newcomers. Which suggests "market failure", IMHO.
“make Canada an energy superpower in both conventional and clean energy.”. . . "they’re open to possibilities, whether that’s new pipelines or new policies, that weren’t an option before"
I have not read the book. But apparently for the book's author and breathless fans "Abundance" means denying the realities that climate science reveals. This is a criminal attack on young people and future generations, and economically destructive even in the short term.
Climate denial has no place in a truly progressive agenda, that is Trump and Poilievre's agenda.